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Executive Education

We provide executive education co-hosted with academic institutions, professional societies, and client organizations. Lunch and LearnSeminars, conducted from one to two hours, are designed to provide a brief overview of a topic. Workshops, conducted from three to five days, are customized and designed to enable deep practical learning.

Lunch and Learn: A Taste of Knowledge

Increasingly, organizations of all types and sizes are introducing and embedding design thinking into their strategy and culture. While many people think of design in terms of industrial products, the applications are much broader and include communications, IT, organized services, dealing with complex systems and environments, services, business strategy, social policy and more.

Increasingly, organizations and projects are experiencing adverse situations that are characterized as "dynamic complexity." These suddenly emerging events must be dealt with immediately because they can co-produce disruptions in day-to-day operations. Unfortunately, serious disruptive changes in expected events and outcomes too often are not recognized early enough. Worse, when leaders become acutely aware of the threats or other immediate symptoms, some may not have the cognitive capacity to effectively address them.

Even experienced Project Managers can suddenly find they are dealing with complex issues - wicked problems that don’t respond to the usual remedies and that threaten their program and can ruin their careers. This can occur even when they manage a project by the book.

Workshops: Deep Practical Learning

Design thinking is a way of thinking, asking questions and making choices that can be applied to complex organizational challenges and opportunities. Design thinking integrates with analytic thinking to allow one to effectively navigate complex management and leadership challenges and opportunities. You will learn the processes and tools of Design Thinking 2.0.

What makes dynamic complexity so challenging is that leadership competencies needed to deal with them are so different from those needed to lead through and solve challenges in simple and stable contexts. We present a new approach to understanding organizational complexity, a condition which characterizes some policies, programs, and projects. We provide new tools that enable effective responses particularly when sudden turbulence emerges in a situation.

This workshop provides concepts and framework for dealing with project and program complexity within your reality, especially in environments where there is significant uncertainty and risk. You will learn the concepts and effective approaches that can be used to manage and lead projects that experience unexpected turbulence despite significant planning.

Diagnostic, Data and Design (D3) Sciences for Navigating Complexity

Dynamic complexity requires one to bring to bear tools that have hitherto been considered separate disciplines. This program provides a fundamental understanding of innovative problem diagnostics and solution design, and how divergent approaches and diverse inputs may be harnessed and harvested to explore solutions to different problems that keep leaders and managers up at night. It gives a complete framework for managing project issues–from identification to resolution. This workshop is offered in partnership with the International School of Engineering (INSOFE), Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO), Bangalore, India.

Systems Engineering and Failure Analysis

Systems engineering is the bridge between project management, the complexity sciences and domain specific disciplines. This workshop is designed to provide the fundamental understanding of systems engineering and complex systems. The course examines a variety of systems engineering topics with emphasis on the: (1) development of the fundamentals of systems engineering, particularly emphasizing on systems sciences as a foundation for systems engineering, (2) systems engineering methodologies and processes, (3) design of complex systems, and (4) planning for systems engineering and management. This workshop is offered in partnership with the International School of Engineering (INSOFE), Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO), Bangalore, India.